The scientist César Rendueles will offer a conference on the loss of future in the FCM

The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host next Thursday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m., the conference titled The Loss of the Future. Catastrophic Technology, Cultural War, and Post-Democracy, which will be given by César Rendueles, a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The event will take place in the Sala José Saramago (La Plazuela, Arrecife) and will be broadcast live on the FCM's website and YouTube channel.

Rendueles will analyze the popularization, in the last decade, of concepts such as hyperpolitics, permacrisis, or post-truth. These are terms that, in his opinion, seek to capture the spread of a type of disturbing sensibility: an atmosphere of diffuse politicization of a growing set of areas of our experience that coexists with a generalized feeling of collective powerlessness. According to the philosopher, more and more aspects of our lives are simultaneously becoming conflictive, unacceptable, and inevitable.

In this sense, he assures that citizens live immersed in what Spinoza called sad affects, a type of sensitivity that diminishes their capacity to act, making them passive, subordinate, and resigned to the influence of authoritarian political figures, invasive technologies, or fake news.

“The mixture of a sense of emergency and indolence in the face of a world in decomposition — but indifferent to our intervention — is fertile ground for authoritarian and illiberal forces to thrive, which, moreover, have generously fertilized it with the guano of so-called culture wars,” he states. During his presentation, Rendueles will reflect on how a large part of contemporary post-democratic dynamics arise from a reactive activation of discourses traditionally considered symbolic, which have acquired an immense capacity to absorb political, labor, or economic conflicts.

In this process, he qualifies, "the large digital platforms play a decisive role, whose monopolistic architecture intensifies the circulation and polarization of these conflicts." This conference addresses that triple interaction between authoritarianism, cultural war, and digital technology that threatens the future of our democracies.

This intervention is included within the reflection space Frontiers and directions of progress of the FCM. A forum intended to review the idea of progress contemplated from multidisciplinary perspectives, and in which the presence has already been counted, among others, of Ramón Margalef, José Manuel Naredo, Federico Aguilera Klink, Fernando Savater, Jorge Riechmann, Ulrich Beck, Marc Augé, Susan George, Daniel Innerarity, Gloria Poyatos, Íñigo Losada, Remedios Zafra, Óscar Carpintero, Antonio Valero, Josep María Esquirol or, recently, Margarita del Val.

César Rendueles is a philosopher, sociologist, and tenured scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC. Previously, he worked as a professor of sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has edited classic texts by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, or Antonio Gramsci. He has published, among other books, Sociofobia. El cambio político en la era de la utopía digital (2013), Capitalismo canalla (2015), Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panfleto igualitarista (2020), Comuntopía (2024), and Redes vacías (2026). His essays have been published in a dozen countries. He regularly writes in El País and other media outlets.